Cracked Glass and Torn Down Houses
by Penmaron
Summary: It takes years to learn how to look at the destruction of beautiful things.


Disclaimer: They're very, very not mine, sadly.

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There is a small side-alley, not far from Baker Street, and in it, there is poetry. It is spray-painted high against one of the crumbling walls in dripping, yellow paint (it's strange, the way that lurid yellow seems to follow them, a strange symbol of – something, surely. Madness? Adrenaline? Orders of Chinese takeaway at two in the morning? All are equally true.) Even when the walls are scrubbed clean, and the vandals move on to the far more interesting back-streets of London, John will remember: _it takes years to learn how to look at the destruction of beautiful things. _

He always pauses, when passing it. The words seem to glisten in the dark and the fresh drizzle of rain, and if he should hear the echo of wild, unearthly screeches on a well-worn violin whenever he should see them – well, surely that would be excused.

Because Sherlock – is beautiful (he could be a model, if he didn't find such a profession inexpressibly dull), and Sherlock is mad. In fact, John is pretty certain that he's going to be committed, one of these days. (For throwing himself towards gun-toting criminals, over and over and over again, or grinning like a schoolboy at the thought of a note co-written by a murdering father and son, or sending a certain ex-army doctor completely around the twist. He's not quite sure which will declare Sherlock insane, once and for all, but something inevitably will.)

(Maybe the world already has, and he just doesn't care.)

He's been in enough relationships, romantic or otherwise, to know that this one – with its _"I don't have friends"_ and "_That was – uh – good"_s – is insane. People like John shouldn't have the experiences of ash settling into his hair like rain, and the empty-eyed stare of a psychopath, dark and unblinking, and the fierce, bloody pluck of violin strings. That's Sherlock's area (unlike girlfriends, and boyfriends, and the concept of normality, in all its mundane glory) – the dashing about a city, revelling in its cracked glass and torn-down houses, treating its inhabitants as pieces of data, to be studied from afar and then discarded, once used.

John's known many people, too, enough to know that Sherlock will never change, not on his account. Oh, there are moments when he is drained of his manic energy (although those are few and far between), when his personal genius will be muttering to himself, too low for John to make out whether it be about what to have for dinner (unlikely – Sherlock seems to exist off of coffee and crime) or something madder. (Like how there are twenty-two different types of glue, and each has a distinct smell and consistency quite unlike the others, perhaps.) Or maybe something more Sherlock-normal, like severed limbs – preferably heads.

And while John does like those long, leisurely afternoons spent doing absolutely nothing at all, he doesn't begrudge the fact that Sherlock treats them like food, or sleep (something to be indulged in, every once in a while, when there is simply nothing else in the world worth doing) because that's who Sherlock _is_. It's written on his elbows. (John's picked something up about deduction, he'd like to think.) While the scars within the crook of his friend's arms have faded, they are still constant reminders that Sherlock is made up of a mind which is blazing and self-annihilating in a world of fire and data and the perversions of humanity, screaming at him, all at once.

(He's seen the other scars, too. They're hidden under the amour of silk and cashmere scarves, a sharp tongue and a closed-off heart, and they scream of fists and the _snick_ of a flick-out blade and the word _freak_ emblazoned underneath his cream-white skin. They don't talk about these, much.)

And if that isn't destructive, then he doesn't know what is.

But it goes further than that, he thinks. While he wouldn't call their _relationship_ destructive, per say, there certainly isn't anything stable about it. Sherlock is nothing but capricious, burning so bright that he is in danger of engulfing himself in flame, and how steady could John (ex-army doctor, tea-drinker, cabbie-shooter, police-mollifier, Sherlock-translator) _be_? Sometimes, the only constant seems to be the feeling of London cobblestones pounding beneath his feet, and the warmth of bubbling chemical experiments in his kitchen sink. (He's learnt not to ask.)

John hadn't seen past it (the lunacy, the long nights spent stitching up pale flesh, the violence, the _unreality _of it all), at first. But when faced with a genius, silver eyes gone supernova at the sight of two severed ears, preserved in salt and placed in a cardboard box to be sent as a grisly gift, or flushed with excitement at the thought of a bullet hidden in a window frame, or the suffocated corpse of a desperate man, greedy and unfaithful to the last; when faced with this, John had begun to wonder. What exactly was it, that Sherlock saw?

(Oh, he knew that the answer would be something along the insufferable lines of "_Nothing more than you, I'm afraid_," coupled with a dramatic flick of the dressing-gown, the absolute git, but it didn't stop him wondering, all the same.)

He'd like to think that although he doesn't quite understand how destroyed things can be beautiful, not like Sherlock (bullets in the walls, a stain spreading through a silken shirt, fingers trailing down John's war-wound, snarled across his shoulder), but he _can_ see it, now. God, it had taken him years (no wonder Sherlock was so barmy – he'd been seeing past the sneer and the curse and the blood-soaked fingerprints which made up his life for decades now), but when faced, months ago, with a genius encased in silk, towering over him with an arm pulling him close and a deduction – (_"It seems that we are sexually and emotionally attracted to one another. I have tired of waiting. Kiss me. Now."_) – on his lips, John had never dreamt of saying no.

He doesn't linger in the alley, but strides down Baker Street and climbs the seventeen steps to 221B, smiling a little at the memory. He is greeted by the all-too-familiar sight of Sherlock staring down a client (an elderly man with flaming red hair, clutching at a smartphone) and ranting at light-speed. (Sherlock's sulk when John had first described his deductions in such a way had involved truly impressive amounts of flouncing and flat-destruction – no doubt due to the fact that he had no idea what light-speed was.)

"- quite obvious from the tattoo of a fish on your right wrist, as only the most skilled of Chinese tattoo artists are capable of such a stain of pink. It's all on my website, _The Science of Deduction_." Without looking away, he continues, "John, I need you. Sit down."

And John knows that if it really is true, that it takes years to learn how to look at the destruction of beautiful things, then it had been worth the wait. Because this is his life, now – one of crime scenes, the flash of a gun and the glint of a blade, and the grin of his artwork of a madman, whose very blood sings of adrenaline and sharp words made of bullet-fire, and John's own utterance of _oh God, yes_.

(And here's a truth for you – given the choice, he wouldn't have it any other way.)

_Finis._

It takes years to learn how to look at the destruction

Of beautiful things.

-Gerald Stern (from the poem 'When I have reached the point of suffocation')

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This is my very first 'Sherlock' fanfic, so I beg for concrit.

Thank you for reading! :-)


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